


You're a Marshmallow, Veronica Mars

by damalur



Category: Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-06
Updated: 2013-07-06
Packaged: 2017-12-17 20:54:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/871855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/pseuds/damalur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Part of you will live forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're a Marshmallow, Veronica Mars

**Author's Note:**

> Rape and assault references comparable to canon. Probably sketchy in terms of timeline, whoops.

The year you turn sixteen is the year of your enrollment. The past is prologue; _before_ is preschool, sunshine, ponies, and kisses. _After_ is the school of hard knocks, pick yourself back up, kid, and keep that upper lip stiff. Between _before_ and _after_ is _during_. _During_ is wondering if the smell of chlorine masked the odor of your best friend’s blood, wondering if it’s better or worse if your rapist is your half-brother, wondering if there’s a way your mother will come in the night and steal away the rest of your life, too. 

Part of you will live, forever, in _during_. Part of you is living there right now, trapped in a refrigerator while America’s favorite son tries to roast you alive; part of you sometimes wakes up at dawn and puts a hand between your legs to make sure you’re still wearing underwear. You carry that part with you forward, into the future, into _after_ , and it makes you tough. Makes you smart. It makes you real.

But before you are sixteen, you are fifteen; and you, at fifteen, is magic. Is perfect.

You are fifteen, and the world is your garden.

-

You aren’t perfect at fifteen. You aren’t some pure, chaste vessel. You sneak out of the house. You lie. You drink. You kiss boys. You kiss girls. (You kissed, once, a girl, who tasted like champagne. Your memory will always flavor champagne with regret, after that.) 

Fifteen bubbles in your mind, frothing over with the potential of some electric spark that might set that sea of promise aglow. You love your friends. You hate your parents. You pretend to hate your parents, but you definitely love your friends, even if sometimes the boys are stupid. Lilly scares you. Lilly loves you. You can’t wait to get your driver’s permit, even if the thought of driving a car secretly scares you in the same way that Lilly scares you. You can’t put a name to the things you feel, fear and excitement mixed in one heady cocktail, so you use other words instead.

Your father’s job exists on the periphery, a demand that carries him forth from your house and washes him back at night. He mentions a lost dog, public urination, stoners lighting up outside his office. You laugh. At fifteen, you don’t understand what he doesn’t say. You don’t wonder about the assaults, the robberies, the white-on-Latino crime spree that you read about later in a retrospective.

At fifteen, you worry about your grades. Your boyfriend. What to wear to prom. That makes your life sounds trivial. It isn’t. You wonder if your parents can afford to pay for college. You wonder if your mom is solely responsible for the empty bottles of vodka you find in the trash. You feel sad. You feel ugly. You feel angry, and uglier for the anger.

Still: at fifteen, the air is enchanted. The air is enchanted, because only magic can change a princess into a corpse, a handmaiden into a frog, a fairy tale into concrete.

-

And you are seventeen, and the world is remaking you.

You cut your hair. You buy butch boots. You tell your dad it doesn’t bother you to follow adulterers, to take pictures of men you once thought good gyrating with women you once thought sinful. You tell your dad it’s fine. You imply experience. You tell your dad it’s fine and tell yourself that you’ve seen worse, that you’ve lived through worse, until one day it is fine. These aren’t people, just bodies, just objects, just two planets in motion and one girl, you, waiting to snap a picture of two bodies as they cross in orbit. 

You take a razor to your hair. You don’t back down. You don’t give in. You write SLUT across your own locker to save the pack some trouble. Standing back, you admire your work, although this you, the real you, you at seventeen, is happy to tell you the hard truth that something is missing. You add a smiley face. It makes you smirk.

You make new friends. You don’t make friends; you barter with people. You remake the world. You kiss boys. You hug your dad, you walk your dog, you hug your dad twice and wonder why he lets you take pictures of planetary bodies fucking in seedy hotels. You feel ugly. You feel angry, and uglier for the anger. 

You burn away your hair. The acrid smell does nothing to mask the memory of chlorine.

-

You are eighteen. You lie. You drink. You sneak out of the house. You kiss a boy. You kill another. You’re glad he’s dead. You tattoo BITCH across your forehead and wear it like a purple heart. 

You are nineteen. You are twenty. You run away, you fall back in. The waves drag you home, but even the seasalt does nothing to hide the acrid tang of chlorine. You let your hair grow long like Lilly’s. You kill yourself and resurrect a new girl in your place. You’ll be better. You’ll be harder. You are harder. You ask for a favor and repay in kind. Generosity is an abstract concept. Your watchword is survival.

You are heartbreakingly young. You have lived in the same town all your life. You have been abandoned, misused, been betrayed, had a thousand clawed hands rending at your soft belly. You are twenty and you sometimes wonder if anyone loves you, how anyone could love you, how you could need love. You don’t need love. You don’t need anyone. You wish you didn’t need anyone, but need is a constant weakness. You wonder why you have to be flesh when you’d rather be stone.

-

You are eighteen, nineteen, twenty on the outside, but inside you are sixteen. You are sixteen now. You will always be sixteen. You are sixteen, and through the fog you hear music, voices, the sound of splashing from the pool below your window. In your memory, GHB tastes like chlorine.

You are sixteen, and you wake up to find your mother gone. Your mother leaves. You aren’t good enough for your mother. Love is nothing in the face of the world. The world is hard. You make yourself harder. You are sixteen. You still sleep with your childhood nightlight plugged in so you can find your way to the bathroom in the dark. You are sixteen, the sheriff won’t believe you were raped, and your mother no longer makes you breakfast before school because your mother has abandoned ship.

-

You are eighteen. Someone asks you if you can even love anyone, if you can ever love anyone you didn’t love before Lilly died. You ask yourself if you can love anyone now that Lilly is dead. You feel angry at Lilly for dying, and uglier for the anger.

-

You cut your hair. You buy butch boots. You remake yourself before the world can remake you. The world is your garden, and kiddo, you are ready to weed. You put fifteen behind you, you leave sixteen in ashes, you bury seventeen under a foundation of concrete. You swim, you laugh, you make yourself harder. You discover suits, just one more veneer you can wear like a person. You earn your life, you hug your dad. You trade seedy motels for seedy murder scenes. At night you go home. You go home, and you take off your suit, you take off your makeup, you water your hair until it grows long like Lilly’s.

You go to bed.

You shut your eyes.

And in your dreams, you are always sixteen.


End file.
